


lines are open

by swordfishtrombones



Series: pick it up loud and clear [2]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:01:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24491683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swordfishtrombones/pseuds/swordfishtrombones
Summary: He’s not always sure what Eddie is thinking when they talk like this. Maybe he just isn’t. Maybe in Eddie’s brain, joking with your friend about a parallel universe where you cohabitate and forcibly care for one another is normal guy talk. Richie supposes that’s possible, although there’s no fucking way Eddie thinks that’s what it is for Richie. Everyone knows that much, now.
Relationships: Bill Denbrough/Audra Phillips, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Richie Tozier/OMC
Series: pick it up loud and clear [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1768549
Comments: 15
Kudos: 121





	lines are open

**Author's Note:**

> This is a little prequel to [my last one](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24357214)—I think you could read it as a standalone if you are like me and have a weird love for unresolved/unsatisfying stories, but otherwise, you are forewarned.

Sean’s sleep apnea snore tears through the night, waking up Richie beside him.

It’s the second time they’ve slept together—slept meaning _sleeping,_ the first time they’d messed around had been plastered in the back of an Uber six months prior—so Richie is prepared for this. They’re in the guestroom, and the full bed feels inarguably small for two adult men, but Richie wasn’t about to fuck in Bill’s California king. Bringing someone here while Bill's away is already bad enough. 

The bedroom windows span almost the length of the room, and although they’re covered with heavy drapes, early morning light still seeps through, giving the impression that the wall is gently glowing. It’s enough to see that Sean has rolled onto his back, mouth wide open, sandy hair falling perfectly even in sleep. 

The trick is to shove him hard enough that he’ll roll onto his side and breathe easily again. Richie gives him a prod. Sean turns his face, breathes normally for about five seconds—and then lets out another huge, gasping snore.

Richie pushes him again. He’s overshot it this time: Sean wakes up. He blinks blearily at Richie, angry and confused. 

“Why’d you _push_ me?” he mutters, only just comprehensible enough to be awake. 

Richie laughs at the hurt look on his face. “Sorry,” he says. “You said to kick you if you snored.”

Sean must be too asleep to really hear, or else he doesn’t care, because instead of responding he shoves Richie back, hard, and flips onto his side to face the wall.

Richie cracks up. 

They’ve been friends for about a year. Sean is a talented writer, with a distaste for the spotlight that Richie finds appealingly unrelatable. He’s levelheaded and smart enough that so far he and Richie have managed to remain friends who hook up sometimes, instead of falling into the dead zone of hookups who have to pretend to be friends. 

In general, Richie likes him just fine. But the shitty truth is that Richie likes him the best when he’s drunk, or dead tired. That’s when he gets a little sharp. A little impatient.

Those moments make Richie think, sometimes, _why not._ It’s not impossible. Except for how Sean has started seeing someone who seems like they mean something, and any one of these days he’s gonna become one of those guys whose fucking around is constrained to threesomes. And except for how, after he sobers up or gets a good night’s rest, he turns all mild mannered again, and then Richie doesn’t feel it anymore. 

If Richie keeps turning in bed he’s going to wake him up again. He turns and gets softly out of bed, finding his jeans and t-shirt in the corner. In the hallway, Richie slides his hands along the white walls, bumping into some hanging picture, and fumbles around the door to the living room until he finds the light switch. 

Without his glasses on, it barely makes a difference. The living room is just a bunch of gray smudges and tall windows, opening up to a well-pruned backyard and a careful ring of trees blocking out the neighbors. The last time Richie was here, Bill had taken him on a walk down the road to a spot where you could see the mountains. They had stood there with their hands on their hips, and then Richie had cracked up inconsolably at the two of them, looking at a mountain from a street full of celebrity homes like it was a picture in a gallery.

Bill has shit taste in interior design, Richie thinks, and then remembers how similar this looks to his own home, and snorts. He makes out the shape and color of his bomber jacket tossed over the back of a plush armchair, and digs his phone out of the front pocket. He presses his thumb to the home button. 

Dead. Earlier, he had noticed a phone charger left stuck in the wall, so he crouches by the wall, squinting, and shuffles along, looking for it. Just as he catches sight of it, he feels something sharp crunch under his bare foot.

 _“Fuck,”_ he mutters, and laughs painfully, his foot stinging. “Asshole.”

He picks up his glasses. The arms are crushed askew, but the lenses seem fine. Richie manhandles the frames back into a passable shape and puts them on. The angle is off enough to be dizzying, but it’ll do. He’s got another pair at home.

It’s just like old times, really. Richie used to fuck up his glasses two or three times a year. If he slides them down his nose, it only gives him a little bit of a headache. He plugs in his phone and squats with it in his hand until it blinks back to life. 

The screen glows white, then shows his lock screen image of Oscar the Grouch tucking Slimy into bed. He’d texted that same picture to Eddie in the hospital one night, when Eddie was finally able to use his phone. _u and me._

Just past four in the morning. Richie taps himself on the tip of his nose three times, counting _five six seven._ That’ll work. He sits down against the wall, legs splayed on the dark wood floor, and calls Eddie.

The phone rings two times, like it always does.

“Hello?” says Eddie, his wide-awake voice coming through, a blast of east coast briskness. 

Richie closes his eyes and grins. Fucking ASMR tingles when Eddie pretends caller ID doesn’t exist. This is when Richie gets really stupid, and when he’s most liable to say stupid things. He pitches his voice low and smooth. “Do you like scary movies?” he says.

"Not so much since I lived through one," Eddie says. "You better find some naive blond to torment."

He's already done that, Richie thinks about saying. He's got one snoring just down the hall. 

Instead, he laughs. "What're you doing?"

"Making breakfast. You're gonna be jealous. Hold on, I'll take a picture."

"Don’t bother," Richie says. "I fucked up my glasses. Describe it to me?"

"How'd you fuck up your glasses?"

"Stepped on 'em."

"How'd you _step_ on them? What were they doing on the floor?"

"Didn't ask. None of my business." 

Sean had tossed them over Richie's shoulder around midnight, while Richie made terrible, unforgivable pleading sounds. 

That wasn’t normal. Last night had felt urgent. Richie had left it too long, and he’d gotten desperate in the worst way—hungry not just to fuck but to _be_ fucked, a deeper and more embarrassing desire. The longer he waits when it gets that way, the more likely he’ll humiliate himself in the act, normal goading words replaced by little sobbing noises of relief. 

Richie has been to a restaurant where you can pay ninety dollars to drink melted marrow with a spoonful of caviar straight from a long white bone. Maybe everyone has that kind of appetite, in one form or another. But casual hookups aren’t supposed to get real like that. It’s too ugly for something that’s just meant to be fun.

He’s still aching, faintly. There’s no reason to feel guilty, but Richie does anyway, for the heck of it.

“You’re a dumbass,” Eddie tells him. “I just installed a hook for my keys. I’m gonna do another one for your glasses. If I don’t see them hanging up every night you’re gonna get it.”

“Don’t make it sound so tempting,” Richie mutters. That could be too much, depending on the day, but Eddie snorts, and Richie smiles. 

He’s not always sure what Eddie is thinking when they talk like this. Maybe he just isn’t. Maybe in Eddie’s brain, joking with your friend about a parallel universe where you cohabitate and forcibly care for one another is normal guy talk. Richie supposes that’s possible, although there’s no fucking way Eddie thinks that’s what it is for Richie. Everyone knows that much, now.

It’s pretty annoying. The most annoying thing is that in Richie’s whole adult life, he’s hardly met anyone who makes conversation this easy. In his twenties, he’d made a friend in the New York comedy circuit he got along with so neatly, he had tried for a month or two to see if he could fall in love with her. She left the scene a few years later, got married and pregnant and moved back to Colorado. 

Richie never went to visit her, but for a long time he thought maybe he’d retire to Colorado someday, like that might turn out to be his home planet. Years after she’d moved, Richie had been booked for a show at Boulder, and he had spent the two days there periodically shaking with laughter over a joke no one else would get. 

It was just a fucking place. The people there were just fucking people, and Richie was still a fucking spaceman. 

You can’t fake where you come from. That shit stays inside you. 

He curves his back away from the wall, trying to stretch out some of the kinks from the night. “What's for breakfast?” he asks Eddie.

“Omelet. I’m trying to do that French fold thing.”

“A lot of food for sir hardboiled egg and a side of cantaloupe.”

“Five meetings today! I didn’t get lunch yesterday, I had to steal someone’s Greek yogurt from the fridge and eat it in the hallway by the bathrooms, it was disgusting.”

“That’s fucked up. I’ll order you a pizza. Anchovies and pineapple, right?”

“Hey, yeah, thanks for the delivery, why don’t you go ahead and charge a nine hundred percent tip to the card.”

Richie laughs, and then stifles it in his fist, not wanting the sound to drift down the hall.

This time yesterday, he had taken his phone down to the pool and sat on the tiles, listening to the faint sound of traffic and birds waking up, and waiting for Eddie to call. It was pleasant, listening to Eddie complain about his day ahead while Richie stared into the pool, trying to imagine it was a slice of east coast ocean. It was nothing close—the North Atlantic is harsher and grayer than any body of water Richie has touched in years. 

Anchored by the phone charger, Richie brings one foot up to his thigh, the barest stretch, and gazes out the tall windows. Birds must smack against these all the time, dying over and over again for the sake of a place that looks kind of cool.

"What are you up to today?" Eddie asks. "Still at Bill's?"

"For like, six more hours. If I piss in one houseplant every thirty minutes I should hit ‘em all.”

“You really shouldn’t leave that to the last minute.”

“Yeah, Audra already doesn’t like me, that’d be the tipping point. _You had one job!_ Might try to write until they’re back."

"Race to the finish?" Eddie offers.

Richie smiles. He likes doing that. "Sure. Okay, I want to write a thousand words today. No Scrabble dictionary, if there’s a space between letters they count as words.”

“I’ve gotta review projections for next year and flag any weird shit Jean missed before it goes to the boss. That mean anything to you?”

“No, but I’m gonna kick your ass.” He almost definitely won’t. Last time they did this, Eddie had crossed his finish line a good twelve hours before Richie sat down and crawled to his. Richie wonders if he can still swim faster than Eddie can, if he could still beat him across Fields Pond. Probably not. Eddie’s lung capacity is probably insane these days, punctured one notwithstanding. 

Richie does miss slivers of Maine sometimes. Fat seagulls fighting for onion rings in the Hannaford parking lot, the smell of carrageenan when you cross into Rockland, little details that just stop existing when you leave. But if he can help it, he’ll still never fucking go back in his life. 

In moments of frustration, Richie has considered that the thing he feels in his gut when he talks to Eddie is just a fucked up kind of homesickness. Nostalgia for a bad childhood coming out in a form of longing he can understand. He’s cancelled his last three therapy appointments, but at some point he’ll have to go in and run that theory. Or maybe not. There are outcomes he'd take over personal growth. 

“God fucking dammit,” Eddie says.

“What’s up.” Richie’s ass is starting to get sore on the hardwood floor, and he cranes his neck to see if there’s an outlet closer to the couch. No such luck. He bends his knees, putting his feet flat against the floor, and relaxes against the wall again.

“Nothing. Did I say I was making an omelet? I meant scrambled eggs.”

“You know what, I changed my mind, let’s see a picture.”

“Offer expired, asshole.” 

The light outside has already started to change. Richie cracks his toes with his hand, making a gross sound that echoes in the big empty room. “Gimme a bite at least.” 

“Yeah, sure,” says Eddie. He’s switched to speaker phone as he eats, and Richie mourns it briefly, the close crackle of the headphone mic. “I’m stuffing scrambled egg into the receiver, open up.”

“You’re not on a landline, you liar.”

“What happened to _‘Yes, and’?_ Isn’t that the first rule of improv.” 

“No, dude, they changed that.”

“Oh. My bad.”

“Yeah.” Richie stretches his legs out long in front of him. “It’s all about height now. Taller you are the funnier you are. Easier to measure that way.”

“Real misogynistic implications there.”

“Oh, excuse me, you don’t think women can be tall?”

“Shut up. You’re not at the top of your game right now. You get any sleep?”

“Eh.” Richie puts on his old man voice. “I miss my Tempur-Pedic.”

“What are you doing up, then? Go back to bed, man.”

“No thanks.” He wonders what Eddie would do if he just said it. Just said _something_ about how this boring fucking conversation is giving him the thing he hadn’t quite found last night. How even in the middle of getting what he was looking for, he’d still been wishing for real satisfaction. What do you think that means, Eds? 

Most likely Eddie would just hang up, or else suffer a conniption so intense it’d kill him on the spot, and then Richie would’ve had to hear him dying twice.

“You hear about that dude who decided sleeping was a bad habit and he was gonna break it?” Richie asks.

 _“Yes,”_ Eddie says, “I read about that too. That guy started having fucking visions, Rich, that is not an experiment that needs a retrial.”

“Sleep is pointless,” Richie says, because he knows that will set Eddie off. It does, hugely, and Richie closes his eyes and leans his head against the wall and listens to the rhythm of Eddie’s voice while he shouts things about memory consolidation and immune system health and mood swings. 

It can’t just be homesickness. It can’t be, not unless you expand the definition. He just got real fucking lucky, he thinks—and then unlucky, and then lucky again. It’s just some insane coincidence, that in all of history, they were born in the same shitty place, at the same shitty time.

+

Richie is startled awake again, jerking back and knocking his head hard against the wall.

“Motherfucker,” he says, rubbing the back of his head. He squints up from the floor to where Bill is standing above him with a duffel bag in his hand.

“Hey,” he says to Bill, voice scratchy to his own ears. He gets to his feet, slowly, feeling sore all the way up and down his body. The living room is bright now. Richie readjusts his glasses, and then remembers they're no longer completely readjustable. “Thought you weren’t gonna be here till ten.”

“Hey,” says Bill. “It is…” He checks his watch. “Ten forty-three. How you doing, Richie?”

The front door slams open, and Audra comes in wearing a floppy hat and a shift dress, a purse over each shoulder and an old fashioned suitcase in her thin arms. She pauses just briefly to look at them. 

“Hi Rich,” she says, smoothing out her face. Richie runs a hand through his hair and bites down on a grin. Audra turns toward the master bedroom, calling over her shoulder, “Everything go all right?”

“The fish lived,” Richie calls to her. “He’s addicted to Takis now. They make him swim faster.”

“Addicted to what?” Bill asks, setting down his bag.

“Doesn’t matter. It’s not funny.” Richie can hear Audra move through the master bedroom down the hall, walking the big circle through the house. He hears her walk into the guest room, and back up the hall again, assessing the scene.

Audra pops her head back into the living room. She’s lost her hat and shoes. “Did you have someone over?” 

“Why,” Richie says automatically, and then wants to roll his eyes at himself for the instinctive defensiveness. So much for _Yes, and._

Audra crosses her arms over her chest. “It’s not a bad thing. We think you should be seeing people.”

Bill puts his hands up at once and turns toward the kitchen. “Anyone want a La Croix?”

“Wow, hey, yeah, thanks,” Richie says to Audra, and laughs. “Actually you know what, I think I’m gonna do that twentieth century English novel thing, and just, like, find some stoic asshole who’ll sit across from me and be like, _This is my….companion._ No fucking.” 

“If that’s what makes you happy,” Audra says, and goes back into the bedroom. 

Richie whistles lowly. He sort of likes Audra, even though he knows Bill squirms every time he has to watch the two of them interact.

Bill comes back with a seltzer in his hand, waving it at Richie in offering. Richie doesn’t laugh this time, which he thinks is very nice of him.

“Hey, naw, I should get going,” he says. He plucks his jacket off the back of the chair. “I got some work to do.”

“Sure.” Bill cracks open the can and sinks into the couch with a groan. “You didn’t bring a bag?”

“I travel light,” Richie says. “My hunter-gatherer instincts.”

Bill smiles. Eddie would say something sharp about Richie’s proclivity for fancy takeout, or about the two hours he had spent on the phone with Eddie one Sunday while ineffectively trying to chase a bat out of his living room. Bill isn’t Eddie, though, and he doesn’t say any of this.

In his car, Richie checks his texts. He’s got a few from his agent that he’s been avoiding opening, and one each from Eddie and Sean. He closes one eye as he reads them, fighting the eye strain.

 _I let myself out,_ Sean’s says. _You could’ve just told me to go home._

Richie reads it twice and snorts. He’ll have to decide what to do about that later, whether he’s okay with being the asshole. He thinks he’s probably fine with it. It seems so laughably insignificant, compared to the other thing. 

Eddie’s text is from two hours earlier, letting Richie know that he’d finished his goal for the day. Richie rests his elbows on his steering wheel, opens his notes app, and types _fish rehab._ Then he goes back to his messages and texts Eddie, _2/1000 words down._

He fiddles with his glasses until he finds a way to place them that feels safe enough, then pulls out of the driveway. It’s a long and inconvenient enough drive that Richie can kind of pretend he’s going somewhere other than home. He takes Mulholland Drive, a route he used to think was magical, and tries to ignore the desire not to return to his empty house.

When he can’t stand it anymore, he pulls over at an overlook, and crosses the street to the patch of roadside dirt with a bench and placard, where you can peer across the Valley. It’s a good view. Rich layers of green hills, the city below him simultaneously lush with trees and choked with human life. When Richie first moved to LA, the shape of the hills had reminded him of landfills—strangely long and broad and connected, compared to the smaller, but more proudly individualistic mountains in Maine. 

Richie sits down on the bench. No one else is lingering, but he doesn’t want to hang out long enough to encounter a tour bus. He takes out his phone and goes back to Eddie’s text. He tries to imagine Eddie typing it, what he might have been doing or thinking as he typed. Whether he gets that feeling, when he texts Richie, like he's been shooting signals into the void so long he's practically forgotten they could be received. 

_im not stoic,_ Richie types into iMessage, then deletes it. Doesn’t make any fucking sense, on the one hand, and on the other hand, Eddie already knows. Might as well go with the less encoded version and just type _i wanna fuck,_ but something tells him that wouldn’t have the desired effect either. _im not up to this,_ maybe. _i dont wanna be your noble companion. but if thats what you want id prob still do it. for the bit._

He lets out a laugh that feels a little forced, and for whose benefit, exactly? Richie puts his elbows on his splayed knees, his phone loose in his hand. He looks at the mountains for a while, then back at his phone screen, then at the mountains again. 

Something has to change.

Abruptly, Richie sits up, scrolls down, and taps Bill’s name.

Bill picks up right away, no perfunctory waiting period. “Hey,” he says. “You leave something after all?”

“I’m going to New York,” Richie tells him, before he can chicken out. “Just, giving you the first opportunity to tell me if that’s stupid.”

“Oh. When?”

“I don’t know. Soon.”

“Okay.” He can hear Bill move to another room, the reverberation of his voice changing slightly. “Do _you_ think it’s stupid?”

“Oh, man, probably.” Richie rubs at his eyes, under his glasses, sending bursts of color across his vision. “Probably.” 

“Do you want...me to talk you out of it?”

Richie cracks a smile at that. “No. It’s good. I’ve been too in my fuckin’ head. I gotta just...you know how it is, two big intellectuals like us.” 

“Let me know if you’re okay, Rich. I’m here.”

Richie looks at his shoe, dragging a line through the dirt. “Yeah.” 

“Love you, man.”

“Yep,” says Richie, always a little embarrassed by how easily Bill can go there. “Okay. See you, Big Bill.”

After they hang up Richie sits still for a few more minutes, trying to look at LA as if he’s never seen it before. He feels light, and a little invigorated, the way he does after doing anything scary. 

Going home doesn't sound so bad anymore, so Richie crosses the street and gets back into his car, setting off again. He cranks the windows down and sticks out his arm, imagining he's visiting town, a quick reprieve from somewhere colder. He'll miss it here, too, he thinks, once he's gone. He'll miss it in that good way you miss every weird, fun vacation, the places you saw before you got tired and needed to go home.

**Author's Note:**

> The “why’d you push me” exchange at the beginning of this was lifted directly from my real life with [orestesfasting,](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orestesfasting/pseuds/orestesfasting) who read this and said “that’s just me….you better give me a shoutout in the notes.” Thanks for letting me get away with this, sorry I basically inserted you as a romantic false lead.
> 
> I encourage you to check out [this resource](https://bailfunds.github.io/) with info about bail funds across many states. My local one is on here and I know they are doing good work.


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